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Capacity Building Committee looks ahead to Ministerial
The Capacity Building Committee (CBC) held its 11th Meeting on 21 and 22 January 2010 in Enschede, The Netherlands, at the invitation of the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) of the University of Twente.
The meeting focused on the Committee’s plans for the 2010 Ministerial Summit, including ideas for a CBC booth at the GEO-VII Exhibition and a short video with personal testimonials about how GEOSS concretely assists people in the developing world.
The Committee’s proposed showcase for the Ministerial will be built around the use of GEONETCast and other information delivery systems such as CBERS and SERVIR. The main idea is to demonstrate that GEO initiatives provide the means by which data and information are transferred from providers to users, who then either use the information directly or build it into applications in order to provide services.
The meeting also reviewed the implementation of capacity-building tasks and provided an opportunity for participants to share information on Earth observation activities in their respective regions and organizations. The USA reported that two SERVIR nodes are operational in Panama and Kenya. The Central American node responded to more than 37 extreme events during the last two and a half years, including providing a very quick response to the recent Haiti earthquake. The African node is providing ecosystem maps, risk assessment maps and other products that have been developed with the Nairobi-based Regional Center for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD) and other partners, such as the US Geological Survey.
Brazil presented an overview of the new regional center of Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE), which has been established in Belém in the Amazon region. The center aims to become a world reference in the monitoring of tropical forests. Cooperation agreements have been signed with France’s IRD (research institute for development), the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the Constellation of small Satellites for the Mediterranean basin Observation (COSMO-SkyMed), and the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa). The first four-week course on tropical forest monitoring is scheduled to be held in Belém in July 2010 for Spanish-speaking students and in November 2010 for English-speaking students.
The minutes of the meeting as well as the presentations that were made are posted here. |
